2023-05-10 23:17:09
Pointing the finger at distributors and not Total, very little for Michel-Edouard Leclerc. “Me, I still find it quite inflated that a minister is addressing distributors and not suppliers,” he said on BFMTV and RMC this Wednesday morning. “If there must be economic actors to lower the price of fuels, it is first of all the one who makes the fuel market”, he added.
Clearly, the president of the strategic committee of the E.Leclerc centers considers “inflated” that the government is asking distributors to reduce their prices at the pump, while a “big supplier”, like the oil group TotalEnergies which reaps “billions profits”, is not “required to lower its prices”.
His remarks follow the declaration of the Minister of Energy Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, last Tuesday, anxious to lower fuel prices to the level of international oil prices in the midst of an inflationary period. Especially since the increase in gross margins achieved by distribution exacerbates the controversy in France.
“The margins secreted by Total last year are at least as high as the year before, the public authorities (it) had asked last year to make rebates and no one was offended that Total did not restore than half a billion to French consumers through its own network alone,” he argued.
Asked about a survey by the consumer association CLCV published on Wednesday, denouncing “explosive margins of distributors on unleaded 95 and diesel”, with a record gross margin “exceeding 25 cents per litre”, Michel-Edouard Leclerc said, “That’s crazy. At the highest in a Leclerc service station, the margin is 8 cents, and on average it is 2.5 to 3 cents”. However, “fuel prices are on a downward trend,” he said.
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